According to renowned gold investor Jim Sinclair, the global debt reset that has been long predicted has begun. Lots of debt that will never be repaid will be written down around the world. Sinclair says gold and silver will be the last men standing when the dust settles.

The BIS, World Bank and the IMF have all issued dire warnings in the past few weeks of financial “storm clouds.” In other words, the biggest bankers in the world are warning of another financial meltdown coming in the not-so-distant future.

Nance Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are being beaten up so badly over the government shutdown and security funding for a wall on the southern border that even singer Cher is telling the Speaker of the House and the minority leader in the Senate to “Be the Hero” and cave in and put 800,000 government workers back to work. The U.S. has a $4 trillion budget (that’s $4,000 billion) and Nancy and Chuck are holding up the government for little more than $5 billion in funding for security that includes a wall. Even Democrat James Carville is making fun of Chuck and Nancy’s response to Trump’s network appeal for a border wall and security on the southern border.

Join Greg Hunter as he gives his take on the top stories of the past week in the Weekly News Wrap-Up.

After the Wrap-Up:

Catherine Austin Fitts founder of Solari.com will be the guest for the Early Sunday Release. She will give us an update on the serious matter of $21 trillion in “missing money” at DOD and HUD and why it will soon affect every American.

In the starkest warning yet about the upcoming global recession, which some believe will hit in late 2019 or 2020 at the latest, the IMF warned that the leaders of the world’s largest countries are “dangerously unprepared” for the consequences of a serious global slowdown. The IMF’s chief concern: much of the ammunition to fight a slowdown has been exhausted and governments will find it hard to use fiscal or monetary measures to offset the next recession, while the system of cross-border support mechanisms — such as central bank swap lines — has been undermined, warned David Lipton, first deputy managing director of the IMF.

IMF Deputy Managing Director David Lipton

“The next recession is somewhere over the horizon, and we are less prepared to deal with that than we should be . . . [and] less prepared than in the last [crisis in 2008],” Lipton told the Financial Times during the annual meeting of the American Economic Association. “Given this, countries should be paying attention to keeping their economy on a level trajectory, building buffers and not fighting with each other.”

While the IMF projected solid, 3.7% growth in the global economy in 2019 in its most recent, October, forecasts, with the IMF set to release updated forecasts later this month, Lipton admitted that the growth outlook is being undermined by trade tensions, policy flaws and weakness in Asia.

“China is clearly slowing down — we think China’s growth has to slow, but keeping it from slowing in a dangerous way is an important objective,” he said, noting that a downshift would be “material very broadly, not just in Asia.”

A resurgence in nationalistic tendencies has been predominately associated with the advents of Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidency. But have these outcomes meant that we now neglect to give due consideration to the years that preceded the supposed breakdown of the ‘rules based global order‘?

If we look at openness, and we see that the situation is improving, you can be absolutely sure that nations will revert to their natural tendency of hiding behind their borders, of moving toward protectionism, of listening to vested interest and will forget about transcending those national priorities. It is not the way to go.

Of paramount importance, according to Lagarde, was the removal of barriers, particularly in terms of global trade. By observing the climate in the present day, trade has become a central pillar of geopolitical disorder in the manner of ‘Trump’s Trade War‘ with China and the potential for supply chains between the UK and the EU to be compromised in the wake of Brexit.

In 2014, Lagarde returned to Davos to speak to delegates about something she called ‘reset‘. Keep in mind at this point that the world was still over two years away from Brexit and Trump’s ascension to power. There had yet to be any discernible rise in what is today characterised throughout the media as ‘populism‘.

While the BitCoin people have hated me for not agreeing with them that a private currency could displace the currencies of all nations and BitCoin would be the new “reserve currency” killing the dollar, to me they are in serious need of help. They have ZERO comprehension of governmental power and ZERO understanding of what is going on behind the curtain. The IMF has come out and stated that each nation should issue their own cryptocurrency and these fools cheers claiming I am not with it and do not get this new age of technology. Sorry, but these people are really clueless if not perhaps undercover people with a mission to get people willing to surrender their final liberty – paper money.

While cryptobugs advocate gold is dead and BitCoin will conquer the financial world, they miss the point entirely. The IMF is by no means embracing cryptocurrencies for the same reason these people have claimed it will bypass central banks. The IMF is advocating the end of paper money to kill the underground or black economy solely to aid the hunt for taxes and to PREVENT bank runs. If there is no paper money, how can you run to the bank in a panic demanding to withdraw your money? They also argue eliminating paper money will end crime.

Now, Michael Andrew, the man appointed by the Australian Federal government to lead the ‘Black Economy Taskforce’ at the end of 2016, is arguing for an interim-step. He believes tracking the currency denomination is the best solution in stopping the underground/black economy and grabbed taxes if you found a $50 or $100 bill on the street and failed to give the government their 50%.

It has become a disconcerting trend that as geopolitical events intensify and keep a majority of people engaged in the latest outbreak of political theatre, the words of central bankers fall on increasingly deaf ears.

At a seminar of the European Stability Mechanism this month, Bank for International Settlements General Manager Agustin Carstens delivered a speech called, ‘Shelter from the Storm‘.

The speech can be summarised as follows:

The IMF may not have enough resources to manage a future financial crisis

The post 2008 ‘recovery’ was nurtured by central banks

Central bank intervention has coincided with the increased accumulation of debt in both major and emerging economies

The latter bullet point refers to Basel III, the regulatory reforms that were devised through the BIS in response to the financial crisis triggered in 2008. The BIS have been pushing the line in recent communications that without these reforms being fully implemented by national administrations, the financial system will remain vulnerable to a renewed downturn. Full adoption of the reforms is not due to occur until 2022.

Discussing the path to ‘normalisation‘ of monetary policy, Carstens states that central banks have ‘implemented normalisation steps very carefully‘:

They have been very gradual and highly predictable. Central banks have placed great emphasis on telegraphing their policy steps through extensive use of forward guidance.

Because of the gradual nature of the turn around from monetary accommodation to monetary tightening, central banks have avoided excess scrutiny. When market ructions do occur, as we have witnessed throughout 2018, geopolitical disorder has been held up as the leading cause. Central banks, as Bank of England governor Mark Carney recently put it, are ‘a side show‘.

The International Monetary Fund is sounding the alarms of another global crisis. IMF is warning that the storm clouds are currently gathering for another financial crisis.

According to a report by The Guardian, David Lipton, the first deputy managing director of the IMF, said that “crisis prevention is incomplete” more than a decade on from the last meltdown in the global banking system. Not only that but on an individual basis, people are largely unprepared for a major financial downturn. “As we have put it, ‘fix the roof while the sun shines.’ But like many of you, I see storm clouds building and fear the work on crisis prevention is incomplete,” Lipton said.

Lipton said individual nation states alone would lack the firepower to combat the next recession while calling on governments to work together to tackle the issues that could spark another crash.

“We ought to be concerned about the potency of monetary policy,” he said of the ability of the US Federal Reserve and other central banks to cut interest rates to boost the economy in the event of another downturn, while also warning that high levels of government borrowing constrained their scope for cutting taxes and raising spending. –The Guardian

In 2017, the financial world was filled with talk of synchronized sustainable growth in major economies for the first time since before the 2008 global financial crisis. This was being proclaimed by global financial elites including Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF.

Now that vision is in ashes. Synchronized global growth has turned into a synchronized global slowdown. Growth has already turned negative in two of the world’s largest economies, Japan and Germany, and is slowing rapidly in the world’s biggest economies, China and the U.S.

China may report something like 6.8% GDP growth, but when all the waste in its economy is stripped out the actual growth is probably closer to 4.5%. That’s still growth, but not nearly enough to sustain China’s massive debt overload. Its debt is growing faster than the economy and its debt-to-GDP ratio is even worse than the U.S.

For a sense of perspective, China had about $2 trillion total debt in 2000. Today, it’s about $40 trillion. That’s an unbelievable 2,000% increase in under 20 years.

Growth is also slowing in the U.S. The 2009–2018 recovery has already been the weakest recovery in U.S. history despite a few good quarters here and there. And there’s little reason to expect it to pick up from here.

GDP expanded 3.5% last quarter, which looks good on paper. But the trend is pointing down. Since this April, we’ve seen growth of 4.2% (Q2), and 3.5% (Q3). This trend tends to confirm the view that 2018 growth was a “Trump bump” from the tax cuts that will not be repeated. And Q4 GDP will probably be lower than Q3.

Goldman Sachs, for example, projects fourth-quarter GDP to expand at 2.5%. It further expects growth to drop to 2.2% by the second quarter of 2019, and to 1.6% by the end of the year.

Funny how it works… The same week Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko imposed martial law on much of the country, the International Monetary Fund assured him that key parameters of the 2019 budget were on track for a proposed $3.9 billion new aid programagreed to last month which is designed to help the country maintain financial stability and the trust of investors especially ahead of an uncertain election period next year.

IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde personally made the assurance in a phone call with Poroshenko on Wednesday—the same daythe Ukrainian president signed the new martial law legislation into effect. According to Ukraine’s popular independent news agency Unian:

It was particularly underlined that the introduction of the martial law does not influence the interaction with the IMF.

Poroshenko’s press service said in a follow-up of a telephone conversation with Lagarde: “The Head of State informed Madame Lagarde about the adoption and the key parameters of the state budget of Ukraine for the year 2019. Madame Lagarde noted that, according to the IMF’s preliminary estimates, the key indicators of the state budget of Ukraine are in line with the parameters agreed with the Fund.”

The president informed me about the key parameters of the 2019 budget, which was recently approved by parliament and is currently under review by IMF staff. The preliminary assessment is satisfactory and the process is expected to be completed shortly.

We’re going to open up this article with a summary of some things that have happened just in the past week, with sources attributed where applicable or necessary:

As of November 23, 2018, it was reported in an article by Guns in the News entitled “Red-Flag laws only lead to gun confiscation,” that 46 gun grabs by red-flag laws have occurred in Oregon, and another 36 in Maryland with 114 requests for the grabs being filed in the courts in the latter state.

The New York Times’ Liz Alderman reported on 11/21/18 that 4,000+ Swedes have accepted microchips to eliminate the use of cash (erroneously believing the desire to do so is theirs). The article is entitled “Sweden’s Push to Get Rid of Cash Has Some Saying, ‘Not So Fast’.” Later on, the article mentions Christine Lagarde, the woman who heads the IMF (International Monetary Fund) as stating that digital currency needs to be investigated further. If she is involved in it, and the IMF? You had better run for cover. Half of Sweden’s banks no longer accept cash deposits, and the article leads off with a photo of a couple of “soy boys” (Ragnar Lodbruk must be turning over in his grave) in a cafe that accepts no cash.

According to our sources, an anonymous White House official and a pair of California firefighters, the Trump administration and CAL Fire are acting in collusion, underreporting a catastrophic death toll because “they don’t want people to freak out and panic,” said our White House source. He said CAL Fire has found the charred remains of 480 people, and that number increases hourly.

The IMF has recommended that all Central banks should issue their own cryptocurrencies. Indeed, they are looking at using Block Chain to keep track of taxes and to enforce negative interest rates with
cryptocurrencies which would allow them to impose negative interest rates whenever necessary. With adopting cryptocurrencies that governments would control, we will come one step closer to losing all our freedom. Central banks could enforce negative interest rates with cryptocurrencies and thus people would find their accounts just garnished. This technology is also causing those in hunt of tax revenues to lick their lips.

The issuance of digital currencies would allow central banks to remain in control of the money supply far more so than they are today. Sweden is moving forward and there we see that the use of cash is rapidly disappearing.
Cryptocurrency technology would allow also the taxman to just cometh and take whatever he desires in the midst of the economic crisis we face. The Central Banks would be able to maintain greater control over the creation of money through the process of leverage (bank lending).

While policymakers in Canada have already researched the idea. The IMF head Christine Lagarde called on central banks to focus on issuing digital currencies. All of this attention is being applied as the fear of rising interest rates in the marketplace is really beyond the control of central banks. It is true that central banks can control the short-term rates, but long-term rates are established by the free market. This is why the Federal Reserves was buying in 30-years bonds hopefully to impact the long-term rates which the Fed cannot directly control.

There are two kinds of globalist schemes: First, there are the schemes they spring on the public out of nowhere haphazardly in the hopes that the speed of the event along with some shock and awe will confuse the masses and make them psychologically pliable. This strategy loses effectiveness quickly, though; the longer the plan takes to implement, the more time the people have to reconsider what is actually happening and why.

Second, there are schemes they slowly implant in the collective psyche of the citizenry over many years, much like subliminal messaging or hypnosis. This strategy is designed to make the public embrace certain destructive ideologies or ideas as if these ideas were their own.

The cryptocurrency scam is of the second variety.

I have been suspicious of the cryptocurrency narrative of a “decentralized and anonymous monetary revolution” since 2009, when I was first approached by people claiming to be “representatives” of bitcoin and asked to become a promoter of the technology. After posing a few very simple questions and receiving no satisfactory answers, I declined to join the bandwagon or act as a frontman.

The “currency” was backed by nothing tangible (and no, math is not a tangible resource). Anyone could create a cryptocurrency out of thin air that had attributes identical to bitcoin, therefore there was no intrinsic value to the technology and nothing stopping the creation of thousands of similar currency systems, eventually making bitcoin worthless. The scarcity argument for crypto was fraudulent. And, in the event of a grid down or an internet lock-down scenario (as has occurred in the past in nations under crisis), crypto was useless because the blockchain ledger was no longer accessible.

Typical estimates, for example those embodied in the International Monetary Fund’s assessments of country risk, suggest an economic slowdown in China will hurt everyone. But the acute pain, according to the IMF, will be more regionally concentrated and confined than would be the case for a deep recession in the United States. Unfortunately, this might be wishful thinking.

First, the effect on international capital markets could be vastly greater than Chinese capital market linkages would suggest. However jittery global investors may be about prospects for profit growth, a hit to Chinese growth would make things a lot worse. Although it is true that the US is still by far the biggest importer of final consumption goods (a large share of Chinese manufacturing imports are intermediate goods that end up being embodied in exports to the US and Europe), foreign firms nonetheless still enjoy huge profits on sales in China.

Investors today are also concerned about rising interest rates, which not only put a damper on consumption and investment, but also reduce the market value of companies (particularly tech firms) whose valuations depend heavily on profit growth far in the future. A Chinese recession could again make the situation worse.

I appreciate the usual Keynesian thinking that if any economy anywhere slows, this lowers world aggregate demand, and therefore puts downward pressure on global interest rates.

Growing stock market volatility is increasingly reminding investors of downturns that twice crashed valuations by more than 50% since the turn of the century. Many Americans remain perplexed as to why the economy appears to teeter perennially on the brink.

A small group of radical economists, followers of the late Ludwig von Mises, think they know why.

“Conventional economists believe that free markets cause booms and busts,” said George Bragues, an adjunct professor at the University of Guelph-Humber, who will be speaking at the International Conference of Prices and Markets taking place in Toronto this weekend.

“That’s only partially true,” said Bragues . “There is a good argument that governments themselves, more specifically central-bank driven borrowing, are the biggest creators of economic euphoria and subsequent depression.”

Do governments cause depressions?

Von Mises’s free-market ideology— so radical it makes the American Republican party look communist—is almost completely ignored by governments, ivy league university economics departments and central banks.

However, that ignorance comes at a price.

Today, the ghost of Von Mises’s ideas haunts much of the planet, where governments have quietly, often secretly, fostered colossal debt bubbles that will almost be impossible to deflate without calamity.

Von Mises’s suggestion that credit bubbles are the key drivers of booms and depression, broadly known as the Austrian Business Cycle Theory, was first outlined in his 1912 book Theory of Money and Credit.

Murray Rothbard built on this theory in his own 1963 work America’s Great Depression, which provided a convincing case study on how the U.S. government fueled the 1920s stock market expansion, collapse and the ensuing spillover effects.

Mises’s out-of-the-box works are particularly important as the planet inches towards peak debt and what the IMF warns could be an impending depression, because populist socialist politicians such as Bernie Sanders will almost certainly blame the free markets.

The US stock market is close to being in a corrective phase -10% off its highs

Global debt has passed $63trln – well above the levels on 2007

Interest rates are still historically low, especially given the point in the economic cycle

Predictions of a bear-market may be premature, but the headwinds are building

The recent decline in the US stock market, after the longest bull-market in history, has prompted many commentators to focus on the negative factors which could sow the seeds of the next recession. Among the main concerns is the inexorable rise in debt since the great financial recession (GFR) of 2008. According to May 2018 data from the IMF, global debt now stands at $63trln, with emerging economy debt expansion, over the last decade, more than offsetting the marking time among developed nations. The IMF – Global Debt Database: Methodology and Sources WP/18/111 – looks at the topic in more detail.

The title of this week’s Macro letter comes from the poet Stevie Smith: –

I was much further out than you thought

And not waving but drowning.

It seems an appropriate metaphor for valuation and leverage in asset markets. In 2013 Thomas Pickety published ‘Capital in the 21st Century’ in which he observed that income inequality was rising due to the higher return on unearned income relative to labour. He and his co-authors gathering together one of the longest historical data-set on interest rates and wages – an incredible achievement. Their conclusion was that the average return on capital had been roughly 5% over the very long run.

This is not the place to argue about the pros and cons of Pickety’s conclusions, suffice to say that, during the last 50 years, inflation indices have tended to understate what most of us regard as our own personal inflation rate, whilst the yield offered by government bonds has been insufficient to match the increase in our cost of living.

Here is our Friday digest of the important news, commentary, charts and videos we were informed by this week including our special podcast on Direct Access Gold.

From our perspective, the most important developments were the IMF’s financial warnings and the escalation in central bank gold buying with Hungary increasing its gold reserves by a whopping 1,000% due to increasing “safety concerns.”

For the first time since 1986, Hungary’s central bank is buying gold bullion – a lot of gold bullion.

The Eastern-European country announced that it had boosted its gold reserves ten-fold, up to 31.5 tons. It not only dramatically increased its reserves but also repatriated the gold from the Bank of England to Budapest due to concerns about “financial stability”.

Central banks in Europe are diversifying into gold or moving to repatriate and take “possession in country.”

Hungary and Poland are the most recent central banks to do this but they follow in the footsteps of Austria, Netherlands and the powerful German Bundesbank all of which have been repatriating their gold from the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve in recent months and years.

Source: Bloomberg

“Gold is still considered to be one of the world’s safest assets,” in the words of the Hungarian central bank.

This view is shared by the President of the ECB Mario Draghi who in February 2013 spoke about how “gold is a reserve of safety” which “gives you a value-protection against fluctuations against the dollar.”

Central bank gold reserves remain very small versus the scale of their massive foreign exchange holdings and their significant exposure to the vulnerable dollar in particular but also the euro and other fiat reserve currencies.